Jul201119

Before Microsoft purchased Skype for $8.5 billion, some of the employees who were let go in the process learned something they hadn’t necessarily realized about the options they had signed on to when they were hired.A clause in former Skype employee Yee Lee’s stock option agreement, for instance, made even his vested options worthless.This revelation inspired Reuter’s Felix Salmon to lambaste Skype and its investor Silver Lake to “downright evil” they had previously been declared “pretty evil” after firing executives right before the sale, ostensibly in order to reduce their payouts.